San Francisco Event Recap

We had the pleasure of meeting many of our San Francisco listeners on May 13. Thank you to the hundreds of people who came out for the event. It was great to talk with you, not just about your Pandora stations, but about all things musical.
The occasion for the party was the premiere of our latest Studio Stories video. After screening the piece, we hosted a Q&A session with the leaders of the Plant Studios, Arne Frager and Mari Tamburo. It was enlightening to hear Arne and Mari’s insights about the music industry, and their opinions on what studios need to do to thrive in today’s climate of home digital recording and shrinking production budgets.

The night also afforded me the opportunity to do a live walkthrough of the music analysis process that serves to build the Music Genome Project. We took a song by Michael Zapruder’s Rain of Frogs, “Shepherd’s Purse,” and pulled it apart to hear the arrangement, the instrumentation, the rhythmic and harmonic construction, and the vocal and lyrical story therein. To close out the night, the trio formation of Michael Zapruder’s Rain of Frogs performed live.
(MZROF as a trio – L to R, Steve Hogan, Michael Zapruder and Kurt Kotheimer.)
Below are some photos from the event. Again, thanks to all who turned out to make it such a fun experience for all of us. We hope to see you all again soon.
(Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren.)

Christopher and Jasmine — The water’s warm here by the Bay. Well, figuratively. The ocean is a bit frosty this far north. But anyhow, northern California is lovely, we agree.
Patrick — I will get one of our good people to help you with your audio problem. If you ever have any technical problems (or any other issues with your time on Pandora), just email pandora-support@pandora.com.

I am very frustrated with this website!! I don’t want a suggestion of artists to listen to when I put an very specific artist in to listen to! This website SUCKS if you only want to listen to ALL the music from only ONE artist! For example, I only wanted to listen to Vicente Fernandez, but it kept on playing on all this other crap! It is a waste of my time to keep clicking on don’t play this song from someone who is not the artist I selected, and not even have a way to play only one artist! It wouldn’t be any different if someone wanted to listen to only Led Zepplin, for example! I hate to sound so rude, but this is very frustrating!
-Someone who is interested in using your site, but can’t use it to play only the music I want at the time.

Looks like you’ve the San Francisco event was fun. It seems like you’re running into money troubles according to the comments, I’m trying to do my part to spread the word.
I just wrote up a list of my suggestions for improvements for Pandora on my blog at http://duffsdevice.blogspot.com/2008/05/13-things-i-would-work-on-to-make.html
I wish you all luck, I love the service, and wouldn’t want to live without it.

Ryan and TimC and CTJ — As long as Pandora continues to have happy advertisers, we won’t need to worry about running out of money. Thanks for your concern, but no need to fear that we’ll be disappearing any time soon. (And hey, click on those ads if you want to make our sponsors ESPECIALLY happy, or let them know how much you love that they advertise on Pandora. -grin- )
Aaron — The reason that you can’t get all songs by the same artist on Pandora is that Pandora is a free radio service. What you describe is not web radio, but rather an on-demand music service, and such a service would require a subscription fee. There are plenty of on-demand subscription services out there; Pandora just isn’t one of those.

Hi Brian –
Verizon, one of our advertisers, sponsored that event…that’s why their name was on the wall.
We are indeed hoping to get Pandora on more cell carriers and more cell phones models in the near future! :) Lucia

Cool site. I’ve been searching for a radio site that plays similar music to the few artists I normally listen to. I’ve discovered that like many more artists. This is very cool and it�s broadening my tastes. Thanks.